Huerta del Valle, a community garden in Greater LA

The dream of a community garden – this is the slogan to blow up the project of Huerta del Valle on the Los Angeles outskirts. A community garden to be integrated by an educational center designed by three California State Polytechnic University Pomona architecture students.



If you need to find words to describe the trend of taking back urban and suburban spaces by citizens with a green eye, then they're urban garden. These kinds of initiatives are spreading like wildfire from Berlin to Hong Kong, from Milan to Los Angeles.





An old industrial wasteland in a low-income zone in Greater Los Angeles has been turned into the Huerta del Valle Community Garden. Here, like elsewhere, the idea of an urban garden turns into a strategic tool to improve the diet and health of inhabitants by supplying them with organic, sustainably-grown produce.



Huerta del Valle has existed for more than two years as an urban garden, and for the last year, three students (Hana Lemseffer, Necils Lopez, Kirill Volchinskiy) from the California State Polytechnic University Pomona have been working on a project to integrate the urban garden with a passive and sustainable educational centre for the many community educational programmes in place, until now held outdoors.



These infrastructures aim at improving the quality of life in general in this zone, by adding a library and kitchen, as well as an amphitheatre and playhouse. 
When the Huerta del Valle Community Garden has these physical facilities, it will become more than just a place to grow vegetables, turning into a driver of positive social change.



The facilities have already been submitted to the city for building permits, and the three students have opened a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter to build them. The campaign will last until early February so building can start immediately in Spring.

Christiane Bürklein

Huerta del Valle Community Garden, www.huertadelvalle.org
Greater Los Angeles
Images: courtesy of Kirill Volchinskiy
https://www.facebook.com/HDVhuertadelvalle/
http://huertadelvalle.org/development/
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1155558207/educational-space-for-flourishing-community-garden